The American Promise – Lecture Notes
Chapter 23 – From New Era to Great Depression, 1920-1932
I. The New Era (Slide 2) Page 685
A. A Business Government
1. Harding and the Economy—From 1921 to 1933, Republicans controlled the
White House; William G. Harding, the first of the three Republican presidents,
was elected in 1920; at the time of Harding’s inauguration, the national
unemployment rate hit 20 percent, the highest ever suffered up to that point;
Harding pushed several measures to aid American enterprise and regain national
prosperity; his policies to boost American enterprise made him a very popular
president, but his administration ultimately suffered due to the corruption of his
appointees, most notably in the Teapot Dome Scandal.
2. President Coolidge—Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1923
elevated his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, to the presidency; he revered free
enterprise; continued and extended Harding’s policies of promoting business and
limiting government;
Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon reduced the government’s controls
over the economy and cut taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals.
3. The President and the Court Defend the Free Market—Coolidge’s policies
found a staunch ally in the Supreme Court; decisions attacked government
intrusion in the free market, even when the prohibition of government regulation
threatened the welfare of workers.
4. The Defeat of Progressive Politics—Coolidge easily won the election of 1924;
confirmed the defeat of the progressive principle that the state should take a
leading role in ensuring the general welfare; Coolidge was right when he
declared, “This is a business country, and it wants a business government.”
B. Promoting Prosperity and Peace Abroad (Slide 4) Page 687
1. The World’s Economic Leader—The repudiation of Wilsonian internationalism
and the rejection of collective security offered through the League of Nations did
not mean that the United States retreated into isolationism; New York replaced
London as the center of world finance, and the United States became the world’s
chief creditor.
2. Disarmament—One of the Republicans’ most ambitious foreign policy
initiatives was the Washington Disarmament Conference that convened in 1921
to establish a global balance of naval power; led to the scrapping of more than
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two million tons of warships; Americans celebrated Harding for safeguarding the
peace while remaining outside the League of Nations.
3. Pledge to Renounce War—A second major effort on behalf of world peace
came in 1928 with the Kellogg-Briand pact; nearly fifty nations signed a pledge to
renounce war and to settle international disputes peacefully.
4. Private Sector Diplomacy—In 1924, American corporate leaders produced the
Dawes Plan, which halved Germany’s annual reparation payments, initiated fresh
American loans to Germany, caused the French to retreat from the Ruhr, and got
money flowing again in Germany’s financial markets; these successes also
fueled prosperity at home.
C. Automobiles, Mass Production, and Assembly-Line Progress Page 688
1. Henry Ford and the Automobile Revolution—In the early twentieth century, the
automobile industry emerged as the largest single manufacturing industry in the
nation; cars, buses, and trucks passed railroads as the primary hauler of people
and freight; also brought other new industries, such as filling stations, garages,
and motels, into being; automobiles altered the face of America, changing where
people lived, what work they did, how they spent their leisure time, and even the
way they thought; nothing shaped modern America more than the automobile.
2. Assembly Lines and Specialization—Efficient mass production made the
automobile revolution possible; as the assembly line became standard in
industry, corporations reaped great profits; but laborers lost many of the skills in
which they had once taken pride.
3. Welfare Capitalism—With the intention of encouraging loyalty to the company
and discouraging traditional labor unions, industries also developed programs
that came to be known as “welfare capitalism”; tried to eliminate the reasons
workers joined unions; sometimes included improved factory safety and
sanitation, paid vacations, and pension plans.
D. Consumer Culture (Slide 6) Page 689
1. Economic Prosperity—Mass production fueled corporate profits and national
economic prosperity; during the 1920s, per capita income increased by a third
while the cost of living stayed the same; mass production of new products
produced a consumer goods revolution in this new era of abundance, and more
people than ever conceived of the American dream in terms of things they could
acquire.
2. The Rise of Advertising—The expanding business of advertising stimulated
the desire for new products and undermined the traditional values of thrift and
saving; linked material goods to the fulfillment of every spiritual and emotional
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need; Americans defined and measured social status and personal worth based
on products they owned.
3. The Problem of Consumption—By the 1920s, the United States had achieved
the physical capacity to satisfy the material wants of its people; the economic
problem had shifted from production to consumption; one solution was to expand
America’s markets in foreign countries, and government and business joined in
that effort; a second solution was to simply expand the market at home; Henry
Ford paid his workers twice the going rate to encourage mass consumption.
4. The Rise of Credit—Not all industrialists were as far-seeing as Ford; many
people’s incomes were too low to indulge in consumer goods; businesses
supplied the solution: credit, installment buying rather than saving.
II. The Roaring Twenties (Slide 11) Page 690
A. Prohibition
1. Banning Alcohol—Republicans generally sought to curb the powers of
government and liberate private initiative; but the 1920s witnessed a great
exception to this rule; the federal government implemented one of the last
reforms of the Progressive era, the Eighteenth Amendment, which took effect in
January 1920; banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol.
2. The Difficulty of Enforcement—The Treasury Department was charged with
enforcing prohibition; although it smashed more than 172,000 illegal stills in 1925
alone, there were never enough Treasury agents; loopholes in the law
guaranteed its failure; “speakeasies” became a common feature of the urban
landscape.
3. Organized Crime—Eventually, serious criminals took over the liquor trade,
turning bootlegging into a highly organized business; Alphonse “Big Al” Capone
became the era’s most notorious gang lord by establishing a bootlegging empire
in Chicago; Chicago witnessed more than two hundred gang-related killings
during the first four years of prohibition.
4. Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment—Gang-war slayings, police corruption,
disrespect for the law by otherwise upright citizens, and a demoralized judiciary
prompted demands for repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment; in 1933, after
thirteen years, the nation ended prohibition.
B. The New Woman (Slide 12) Page 692
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1. Women in Politics—Of all the changes in American life in the 1920s, none
sparked more heated debates than the alternatives offered to the traditional roles
of women; politically, women entered uncharted territory in the 1920s when the
Nineteenth Amendment granted them the vote; women began pressuring
Congress to pass laws that especially concerned women, including measures to
protect women in factories and grant federal aid to schools.
2. Challenges to Women’s Political Influence—Women’s only legislative success
came with the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, which funded state efforts
to curb infant mortality; a number of factors helped to thwart women’s political
influence, including male domination of both political parties, the rarity of female
candidates, and women’s lack of experience in voting.
3. Special Protection vs. Equal Protection for Women—Women failed to form a
solid voting bloc; feminists argued over whether women should fight for special
protection or equal protection, and in 1923, the divided feminist movement saw
Congress shoot down the Equal Rights Amendment.
4. Women at Work—Economically, more women worked for pay, but they
clustered in “women’s jobs,” many working as secretaries, stenographers, typists,
nurses, librarians, elementary school teachers, salesclerks, and telephone
operators.
5. The Flapper—Increased earnings gave women more buying power and a
special relationship with the new consumer culture; a stereotype soon emerge of
the flapper, a woman who spent freely on the latest styles and danced all night to
wild jazz.
6. Birth Control—The new woman both reflected and propelled the modern birth
control movement as well; by the 1920s, this movement linked birth control and
eugenics; made contraception a respectable subject for discussion.
7. Challenging Standards—Flapper style and values spread from coast to coast
through films, novels, magazines, and advertisements; new women challenged
American convictions about women and men in separate spheres, the double
standard of sexual conduct, and Victorian ideas of proper female appearance
and behavior.
C. The New Negro (Slide 14) Page 694
1. Challenging Racial Divisions—The 1920s also witnessed the emergence of
the “New Negro”; the prominent African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois
and the NAACP aggressively pursued the passage of a federal antilynching law
to counter mob violence against blacks in the South.
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2. The Rise of Garvey—Many poor urban blacks, disillusioned with mainstream
politics, turned to a Jamaican-born visionary named Marcus Garvey for new
leadership; Garvey urged African Americans to rediscover the heritage of Africa,
take pride in their own culture and achievements, and maintain racial purity by
avoiding miscegenation; launched the Universal Negro Improvement Association,
which created the Black Star Line shipping company to support the “Back to
Africa” movement; Garvey was eventually convicted of mail fraud, jailed, and
deported, but his legacy remains at the center of black nationalist thought.
3. The Harlem Renaissance—New York City’s black population jumped 115
percent during the 1920s; an extraordinary mix of black artists, sculptors,
novelists, musicians, and poets made Harlem their home and set out to create a
distinctive African American culture that drew on their identities as both
Americans and Africans; incredible flowering of artistic talent, including James
Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas;
despite the dazzling talent produced by the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem
remained a separate black ghetto that most whites knew only for its lively
nightlife; creative burst left a powerful legacy, but did little in the short run to
dissolve the prejudice of a white society.
D. Entertainment for the Masses Page 696
1. Hollywood—In the 1920s, popular culture, such as consumer goods, was
mass-produced and mass-consumed; nothing offered escapist delights as
effectively as the movies; Hollywood, California, discovered the successful
formula of combining opulence, sex, and adventure; by 1929, the movies were
drawing more than 80 million people in a single week.
2. Sports—Americans also found heroes in sports, as they fell in love with
baseball’s Babe Ruth and boxing’s Jack Dempsey; football, essentially a college
sport, held greater sway with the upper classes.
3. Charles Lindbergh—The decade’s hero worship reached its zenith when
Charles Lindbergh, a young pilot, set out on May 20, 1927, from Long Island in
his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, to become the first person to fly nonstop across
the Atlantic; perfect hero for an age that celebrated individual accomplishment.
4. Radio—The radio became important to mass culture in the 1920s; brought
news, sermons, soap operas, sports, comedy, and music, especially jazz, into
America’s homes.
E. The Lost Generation (Slide 15) Page 697
1. Alienation and Expatriation—Some writers and artists felt alienated from
American mass-culture society; found it shallow, anti-intellectual, and
materialistic; many of these writers and artists left the United States to live in
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Europe; this so-called Lost Generation helped launch one of the most creative
periods in American art and literature in the twentieth century; included Ernest
Hemingway.
2. Exiles in Spirit—Writers who remained in America—many of whom had
embraced progressive reform movements early in the century—were often exiles
in spirit; acted as lonely critics of American cultural barrenness and vulgarity;
included Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
III. Resistance to Change (Slide 16) Page 698
A. Rejecting the Undesirables
1. Nativist and Antiradical Sentiments—After the war, large-scale immigration
resumed at a moment when industrialists no longer needed new factory workers;
nativist and antiradical sentiments ran high; rural Protestants were particularly
alarmed that most of the immigrants were Catholic or Jewish.
2. The Johnson-Reed Act—Congress responded by severely restricting
immigration; the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants to
no more than 161,000 a year and gave each European nation a quota based on
2 percent of the number of people from that country in America in 1890; the act
revealed the fear and bigotry that fueled anti-immigration legislation, squeezing
out some nationalities far more than others; reaffirmed 1880s legislation that
barred Chinese immigrants and added Japanese and other Asians to the list of
the excluded nationalities; however, it did not restrict immigration from the
Western Hemisphere because agriculture in the Southwest had come to rely on
Mexican labor; rural Americans, who had little contact with eastern or southern
European immigrants, along with industrialists and labor leaders, supported the
1924 act.
3. Sacco and Vanzetti—Antiforeign hysteria climaxed during the 1920 trial of
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchist immigrants from Italy who
were arrested for robbery and murder; when Massachusetts executed the two on
August 23, 1927, 50,000 mourners followed the caskets in the rain, convinced
that the men had died because they were immigrants and radicals, not because
they were murderers.
B. The Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan Page 700
1. Expanded Targets—The nation’s antiforeigner mood struck a chord in
members of the Ku Klux Klan, which experienced a rebirth in 1915; the new Klan
expanded its targets beyond African Americans; promised to defend family,
morality, and traditional American values against the threat posed by blacks,
immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews.
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2. National Influence—Building on the frustrations of rural America, the Klan
quickly attracted some 3 to 4 million members, men and women alike; by the
mid-1920s, it wielded a strong influence over politics in many states, including
Indiana, Illinois, California, and Texas.
3. Declining Support—Eventually, social changes, along with lawless excess,
decreased the Klan’s significance; yet Klan members’ grievances remained.
C. The Scopes Trial (Slide 18) Page 701
1. Fundamentalism versus Science—Old-time fundamentalist religion and the
new spirit of science went head-to-head in a Tennessee courtroom after John
Scopes, a biology teacher, offered to test the constitutionality of his state’s ban
on teaching evolution; agnostic defense attorney Clarence Darrow took on the
prosecution’s fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan.
2. A Media Circus—The trial quickly degenerated into a media circus; first trial
covered live on radio; most of the reporters from big-city papers were hostile to
fundamentalist Bryan, who successfully defended the Tennessee law, and
continued to side with Scopes.
3. Inflaming Divisions—The trial dramatized and inflamed divisions between city
and country, intellectuals and the unlettered, the privileged and the poor, the
scoffers and the faithful.
D. Al Smith and the Election of 1928 Page 702
1. Social Issues—The presidential election of 1928 brought many of the
significant developments of the 1920s—prohibition, immigration, religion, and the
clash of rural and urban values—into sharp focus.
2. The Candidates—Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, the energetic
secretary of commerce and the leading public symbol of 1920s prosperity;
Democrats nominated four-time governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, dubbed
“Alcohol Al” for his opposition to prohibition; Smith, whose parents were
immigrants and who got his start in New York City’s Irish-dominated political
machine, seemed to represent all that rural America feared and resented; he was
especially vulnerable in the heartland because he was Catholic.
3. The Results—Hoover, who neatly combined the images of morality, efficiency,
service, and prosperity, won the election by a landslide; took nearly 58 percent of
the popular vote and gained 444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87; Republicans even
won four states in the Democratic South.
IV. The Great Crash (Slide 29) Page 703
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A. Herbert Hoover: The Great Engineer
1. “The Great Humanitarian”—Hoover personified the rags-to-riches ideal; one of
the world’s most celebrated mining engineers by the time he was thirty; his
success in managing efforts to feed civilian victims in World War I won him
acclaim as “The Great Humanitarian”; served as secretary of commerce under
Harding and Coolidge.
2. A Progressive Republican—Hoover entered the White House as a Progressive
Republican; called for a limited business-government partnership and a reform
agenda that called for a nation of homeowners and farm owners whose savings
were protected and whose jobs were secure.
3. Ideological and Political Liabilities—However, Hoover’s ideological and political
liabilities prevented him from providing the leadership demanded by the Great
Depression; burdened by his insistence on self-reliance and limited government,
as well as his lack of political experience, his thin skin, and the astronomical
expectations of the public.
B. The Distorted Economy
1. An Unstable International Economy—In the spring of 1929, the United States
enjoyed a fragile prosperity, but it had done little to help rebuild Europe’s
shattered economy after World War I; high tariffs and demands on Europeans for
repayment of wartime loans led to an unstable international economy; debt
increased dramatically.
2. Poor Distribution of Wealth—The domestic economy was also in trouble, as
wealth was badly distributed; farmers continued to suffer from low prices and
chronic debt, and industrial workers’ wages rose but did not keep pace with
productivity and corporate profits; the wealthiest 1 percent of the population
received 15 percent of the nation’s income; produced a serious problem in
consumption.
3. Signs of Trouble—Signs of economic trouble began to appear at mid-decade;
new construction slowed down, automobile sales faltered, companies began
cutting back production and laying off workers, and many banks failed.
C. The Crash of 1929 (Slide 21) Page 705
1. Faith in the Market—Even as the economy faltered, America’s faith in it
remained unshaken; Americans remained upbeat and continued to speculate
wildly in the stock market on Wall Street; between 1924 and 1929, the values of
the stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange increased by more than 400
percent.
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2. The Market Crashes—Finally, in the autumn of 1929, the market hesitated;
nervous investors began to sell their overvalued stock; the dip quickly became a
panic, as investors tried desperately to unload overvalued stock on Black
Thursday, October 24, and Black Tuesday, October 29; stock market lost sixsevenths of its total value over the next six months.
3. Halting Economic Activity—The crash alone did not cause the Great
Depression; but the dramatic losses in the stock market and the fear of risking
what was left acted as a great brake on economic activity; shattered the New
Era’s aggressive confidence that America would enjoy a perpetually expanding
prosperity.
D. Hoover and the Limits of Individualism
1. Bargaining with Business and Labor—In November 1929, Hoover called a
White House conference of business and labor leaders and urged them to join in
a voluntary plan for recovery: Businesses would maintain production and keep
their workers on the job, and labor leaders would accept existing wages, hours,
and conditions; the bargain quickly fell apart; demand for products continued to
decline, which led to further cuts in production and loss of jobs; fueled the terrible
cycle of economic decline.
2. Dealing with the Problems of Rural America—In 1929, Hoover got Congress to
pass the Agricultural Marketing Act, which created a Farm Board to help raise
crop prices; when prices continued to decline, Congress established the HawleySmoot tariff in 1930, the highest tariff in history; also authorized $420 million for
public works projects to give the unemployed jobs and create more purchasing
power; despite his efforts, with each year of Hoover’s administration, economic
conditions worsened.
3. Aiding Industry—In 1932, Hoover authorized the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation (RFC), a federal agency empowered to lend government funds to
endangered banks and corporations; theory was trickle-down economics: pump
money into the economy at the top, and in the long run, people at the bottom
would benefit; did little to help the poor, whose numbers steadily increased.
4. Hoover’s Limits—Cries grew louder for the federal government to give hurting
people relief; Hoover’s response revealed the limits of his conception of the
government’s proper role; his circumscribed philosophy of legitimate government
action proved vastly inadequate to the problems of restarting the economy and
ending human suffering.
V. Life in the Depression (Slide 22) Page 707
A. The Human Toll
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1. Statistics—The numbers only hint at the human tragedy; in 1929, national
income was $88 billion; by 1933, it had declined to $40 billion; in 1929,
unemployment was at 3.2 percent, or 1.5 million workers; by 1933, the numbers
had jumped to 25 percent and 13 million workers.
2. Joblessness, Hunger, and Poverty—Jobless, homeless victims wandered in
search of work, and the tramp, or hobo, became one of the most visible figures of
the decade; rural poverty was most acute, and tenant farmers and
sharecroppers, mainly in the South, came to symbolize how poverty crushed the
human spirit.
3. Strapped Charities—There was no federal assistance to meet this human
catastrophe; instead Hoover relied on a patchwork of strapped charities and
destitute state and local agencies.
4. Finding Scapegoats—The deepening crisis roused old fears and caused some
Americans to look for scapegoats, such as recently arrived Mexican immigrants;
as many as half a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported or
fled to Mexico.
5. Changing the Family—The depression deeply affected the American family;
young people postponed marriage and had fewer children; white women who
worked in service areas did not lose their jobs as often as men who worked in
heavy industry, and these idle husbands suffered a loss of self-esteem.
B. Denial and Escape Page 710
1. Hoovervilles—President Hoover tried to express his optimism about economic
recovery; contradicted by widespread shantytowns (called Hoovervilles) and
suffering; Hoover became increasingly unpopular.
2. Refuge at the Theater—While Hoover practiced denial, maintaining that no
one in America was starving, other Americans sought refuge at the movies;
throughout the depression, nearly two-thirds of the nation scraped together
enough change to fill movie palaces each week; a few filmmakers did attempt to
grapple with the depression woes rather than to escape them.
3. Rising Crime—Crime increased during the 1930s; people saw bank robbers as
only getting back what banks had stolen from the poor.
C. Working-Class Militancy (Slide 25) Page 711
1. Rising Protest—The nation’s working class bore the brunt of the economic
collapse; the American people were slow to anger, then strong in protest, and
workers and farmers began to mount uprisings across the country.
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2. Veteran Protest—In June and July 1932, tens of thousands of unemployed
veterans traveled to Washington to petition Congress for the immediate payment
of their 1924 pension, or bonus; Hoover ordered the army to evict the Bonus
Marchers, further undermining his popularity.
3. The Revival of the Left—Hard times also revived the left in America, bringing
socialism back to life and propelling the Communist Party to its greatest size and
influence in American history; the left also led the fight against racism, attacking
the sharecropping system in the South; the Communist Party defended the
Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men arrested on trumped-up rape charges in
Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931; breadlines, soup kitchens, foreclosures,
unemployment, and cold despair drove patriotic men and women to question
American capitalism.
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